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CLIMATE CHANGE ALBERTAS BIODIVERSITY 33 BIODIVERSITY MANAGEMENT AND CONSERVATION PLANNING Climate change should factor into the choice of biodiversity objectives and the approaches used to achieve them. Management actions can support species responses to climate change through already well-understood approaches andconservationplanningcanincorporate climate change scenarios to effectively achieve biodiversity objectives across a range of potential futures. The goal of biodiversity conservation is to maintain ecosystems species and genetic diversity along with the processes that shape them. Richard Schneider 2014 explored how climate change impacts could be considered when defining specific biodiversity objectives and how these objectives can be most effectivelyachievedthroughconservation planning and management. Effective biodiversity management requires operationally defining the ecological state that is to be achieved. Frequently these objectives identify human development and land-use change as the primary sources of ecological changes. However climate change is also a potent driver of ecological change that will challenge many efforts to achieve biodiversity objectives if it is not explicitly considered when the objectives are defined. Biodiversity objectives will need to be adjusted to reflect biodiversity responses to ever-changing climatic conditions. Protected areas are widely recognized as a critical tool for biodiversity conservation in a changing climate.32 Albertas network of protected areas is based largely on the goal of representing current ecosystem diversity by representing the provincial Natural Regions and Subregions.33 With climate change ecosystem distributions will shift over time so it may be appropriate to link representation to regional landscape characteristics like soil types or geological features that are likely to remain stable over time. See page 40 for further explorations of this approach for Alberta. Climate refugia page 42 for high priority species or species groups could be considered for protection as a species-level complement to landscape-level priorities. Both inside and outside of protected areas active management for some species and ecosystems will be required to meet biodiversity objectives not to resist the potential impacts of climate change but to support species whose ranges may be shifting in response to a changing climate. The tools to do so are well-known and some are already being implemented by practitioners including reduction of human disturbance removal of dispersal barriers assisted migration page 37 and exclusion of non-native competitors. Uncertainty about the scale and effects of climate change will necessitate novel approaches to planning for biodiversity management and conservation. Alternative planning methods that can accommodate this additional uncertainty are the identification of no-regrets strategies that minimize the overall risk of catastrophic outcomes or the application of multiple bet-hedging strategies simultaneously in different regions that in concert lower the risk of widespread failure in achieving biodiversity objectives. 32 Canadian Parks Council Climate Change Working Group. 2013. Canadian Parks and Protected Areas Helping Canada Weather Climate Change. Parks Canada Agency on behalf of the Canadian Parks Council. 52 pp. 33 Scientific Framework for Alberta Parks. Available at httpwww.albertaparks.caalbertaparkscamanagement-land-usebuilding-the-parks-systemscientific-framework.aspx